50 ECT Sessions a Day Not Enough for McLean

     McLean Hospital, just outside Boston, Massachusetts, performs 10,000 electroshock sessions on people per year. The affluent, mansion filled, bedroom community for Boston where the psychiatric hospital is located is as halcyon an environment as you could ask for to camouflage this modern day chamber of horrors.

     The hospital was founded as the Asylum for the Insane in 1811 by a group of prominent Bostonians concerned about the fate of the homeless and the mentally ill in their city. Like many of the country’s asylums that opened in the early 1800s, Mclean was run on a “moral treatment” philosophy for the mentally ill with a compassionate, holistic approach that focused on recreational activities, moderate physical labor, and an enjoyment of nature to promote recovery.

     Not so today. Mclean is one of the largest ECT delivery centers in the United States. They perform fifty electroshock sessions per day and most patients receive a total of eight to fifteen brain jarring shocks over a three to four week period. The number of electroshock treatments delivered there today is four times as many as they delivered back in the 1990s. Sylvia Plath and James Taylor are two of their better known residents.

     Still, 10,000 electroshock treatments a year is not nearly enough for them.

     Their website page says “ECT Isn’t a Last Resort. ECT doesn’t have to be the last line of defense.” The FDA, of course, does not agree with that. They have approved it only for treating severe psychiatric conditions, such as adults with treatment-resistant, severe major depressive episodes, bipolar disorder, catatonia, or schizophrenia.

     ECT is only a last resort treatment, per the FDA, used when all else has failed.
 
     But not per Mclean. With today’s technical advances in ECT, they claim that what was once already “an effective and safe treatment is now a more effective, more comfortable, and safer treatment.”

     “This is good news,” their website claims. Now they can use ECT “to treat a broader population of patients — and not just as a last resort.”

     Good news, huh? Easy for them to say. Billed at up to $2500.00 per twenty minute treatment, that’s $25,000,000 a year in Mclean’s coffers for those ten thousand sessions.

     That’s a lot of money for permanently impairing a person’s long and short term memory and cognitive ability, not to mention increasing the probability of having cardiac problems.

     Sorry. Not “a person.” It’s fifty people per day, at Mclean.

     And counting.